Extraordinary Absorption of Decorated Undoped Graphene

We theoretically study absorption by an undoped graphene layer decorated with arrays of small particles. We discuss periodic and random arrays within a common formalism, which predicts a maximum absorption of 50% for suspended graphene in both cases. The limits of weak and strong scatterers are investigated, and an unusual dependence on particle-graphene separation is found and explained in terms of the effective number of contributing evanescent diffraction orders of the array. Our results can be important to boost absorption by single-layer graphene due to its simple setup with potential applications to light harvesting and photodetection based on energy (Forster) rather than charge transfer.